Accepting complete responsibility for your state of mind: always and without exception

You’re talking on the phone in the morning to your mother and your mother says, “I’m not feeling well today,” but you don’t have to listen to her explain why she thinks she’s not feeling well. She says, “Oh you know I’m not feeling well, but Jesus told me I decided I’m not feeling well.” Then she said to Jesus, “Well, then I’m going to have to change my mind,” and Jesus said, “That’s a very good idea, let’s do it together.” And your mother says, “I’m feeling much better now, because I accepted responsibility for my state of mind, because I accepted that there’s nothing outside of me that can make me sick, and I chose a miracle instead.” Then your mother said, “I think I’m going to do this every day, I’m going to be a miracle worker.” And this example is why everything in the whole world would change if we started to realize there is no cause outside our mind.

Now there is a part in the Manual for Teachers of A Course In Miracles where Jesus says, “Sickness is a decision and you can change your mind at any time.” But, he also says, “What will this decision cost you?” He is actually saying, “What will the decision for healing cost you?” And he says, “It will cost you the whole world you see,” that’s the price of healing, the whole world that you see because the body will no longer seem to be the decision maker and the world of form will no longer be seen as the ’cause.’ When we think of decisions we always think of persons, we’ve given away the decision maker in our mind and we’ve put it on the body. But if you could recognize the decision is always in your mind, no matter what the circumstance, then you could accept the healing. So that’s what it takes to hit the reset button for healing: you have to be willing to be wrong about everything you believe about the world including the belief that people make decisions. Because people are just puppets of the ego, and yes the ego made the puppets and the ego tells the puppets what to do. The ego makes the puppets seem sick, and it’s the ego that makes the puppets die and makes them seem like they can decide, but people do not decide. There’s really only one of us, One Mind, Uno Sola Mente, and that’s the only realization you have to have. That is the prayer, that is the reset button, but it will cost you the whole world, you see.

This is a reflection of the workbook lesson from A Course In Miracles: “When I am healed, I am not healed alone.” Well remember that the mind is very powerful and when you give a very powerful mind a crazy idea, a crazy belief, that’s where you get a crazy world. I was mentioning that new movie, Split, and the main character seemed to make up twenty-three different personalities. The therapist that was working with this patient was helping them to honor and respect all of the personalities, and that’s the first step in healing. You’re looking for wholeness, you’re looking for integration, you’re looking for that experience that says, they are not different from me, because we are the same. The personalities are not the same, but the mind that made up the personalities is the same. The dreamer is the same, it’s only one dream, and so if I take responsibility for my state of mind with the whole dream, then everyone must share in my healing.

All the great religions and spiritualities talk about Love and Oneness, and the error always talks about separation and differences. So when you’re able to realize the power of the mind and to realize that you have not misused this mind, that God never gave you the power to misuse the Light, that you remain as the Light, that means that everything is healed together. That’s when evil becomes impossible, if we are all One Self then there is no evil. This world comes from the belief in a separate self apart from God. So this means that once you see a brother first as a mirror, then you will see this other as an opportunity to forgive in the mind, and then once you actually forgive, there is no other, there’s only Christ. When we talk about this reset button we start to realize that the reset button is that everything is in our mind. So this helps us understand the meaning of Jesus’s words. Jesus is telling us the family of God lives in your mind because everyone lives in your mind. Not the images of who we think they are in the past, but who they are as God created them. So when Jesus said, “Sell all your possessions, leave your family and follow me,” he was really saying, “Let go of the past.” Let go of all your beliefs and ideas of who you think they are, let go of all the concepts of this earthly family because those concepts are still made up by the ego.

One time Jesus was teaching a large group (this is a story from the Urantia Book) and in the back of the crowd Mother Mary showed up and word started to spread, “Your mom is here.” But Jesus continued teaching as if nothing special had happened and he could feel the crowd had started getting distracted a little bit and so he said, “Who is my father, mother, sister, brother? He who does the will of my Father in Heaven is my father, mother, sister, brother.” So he’s asking us to reclaim the power of our mind, of our Divine Mind that lives in the Mind of God and to let go of any past associations that would block us from the light. Because guilt always comes from past associations, only Love comes from the holy instant. If we could be completely present in this moment, we would have no guilt whatsoever. There’s another time in A Course in Miracles where Jesus says, “In no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, whenever we think about the past, we are thinking about the body and whenever we have future goals we are thinking about the body,” but he said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” A hand is very close, he is inviting us to go deep into our hearts into the stillness, into the Love.

Yesterday I came to the cinema here in Monterrey to watch a Martin Scorsese’s movie “Silence” and it was a very deep movie involving Christianity being carried or taken from Portugal over to Japan. And the leaders in Japan basically resisting, saying, “No thank you, we don’t need Jesus, we have our culture, we have our Buddha and our own way of life for many centuries. The Christian Missionaries had been going to Japan, following what they believed was their mission, to share Christ with everyone in the world. It reminded me a little bit of Superman vs. Batman, since I was watching people getting killed, and fighting, and preaching, and more killing. It was a crazy battle of cultures and theologies, like Jesus vs. Buddha, and it seemed at the end, Buddha won. But when the priest was dying and his body was burning, he had a little cross in his hand. So it showed the folly of theology because the essence of Buddha is Love, and the essence of Jesus is Love, and Love doesn’t fight itself. Not only that but Love does not try to convince anyone that it’s real. So isn’t it great that we don’t have to convince anyone about anything, but we do have to allow the Spirit to convince us that we are Spirit. Think how wonderful this is in all your relationships, you don’t have to convince a husband or a wife, a boyfriend, a girlfriend. You don’t have to convince your children of anything, you don’t have to convince your parents of anything, you learn to let all things be exactly as they are, you’re here to learn complete acceptance.

Imagine how wonderful the world would be if a child is offered Broccoli, the mother has cooked the broccoli and served it to the child and the child says, “No thank you, I don’t like the taste of it.” “Okay, I love you,” says the mother. Not even convincing a child to eat food, what a beautiful world, when you allow your mind to be convinced instead of projecting that convincing onto the puppets. And so, I would say, that this is actually practical.

One time I went to a park and I was playing with a child and the child and I were laughing and we were on the swings, swinging higher and higher. And then the mother of the child appeared and she said, “You looked like you were having a lot of fun with my child,” I said, “Yes, yes, we were having fun on the swings together.” And she said, “Wait until you get your own, then you’ll see if it’s fun.” But that’s the whole thing of ownership, as soon as we think we own something then there’s a responsibility, a heavy responsibility. If you walked out of the hotel into the parking lot, you could find a car in the parking lot and you say, oh well, it’s a car.” But if it’s your car then you’ve got responsibility. You have to think about gasoline and oil, you’ve got to keep the car clean. If somebody takes the car you get upset. It’s the ownership that’s the problem because the ownership is always about the personality self. Christ doesn’t own anything and that’s why Jesus said, “Leave it all behind and follow me.” He was basically just saying, “Leave the ownership and responsibility behind and come into true freedom.”

Love does not possess. And this whole world is based on the belief of possession. For example, if you let your eyes pass around this room, we could say well that is a big lamp, but somebody owns that lamp. That lamp is a possession, or maybe someone rents it from somebody who owns the building and the same applies with people. You say, “Oh I’m her boyfriend, and I’m her daughter and you can go around the room, but everybody is possessed, belongs to something, and that’s what the problem is. If we said, “We’re all children of God,” that would be turning in the right direction. If we perceived everyone as equal, completely equal, that’s moving in the right direction because that’s moving towards Oneness. And so you see to actually follow Jesus requires lots of trust, because all of your doubt thoughts about Jesus will get acted out by the people.

The more I got involved in studying and practicing A Course in Miracles, that stirred up things for everybody in my family. They said, “Okay, it’s a nice book to study, but what are you going to do for a career? How will you make a living?” You see those are the questions and reflections that start to come when you follow Jesus very deeply. And we all know that voice in our mind when we start to practice to meditate or to study a spiritual scripture. There’s this voice in our mind that is the voice of doubt, it feels threatened, and so that voice of doubt needs to be washed away. We have to be convinced that we are not those doubt thoughts, that we are not that fear, and we are not that judge.What you’re describing is common to all human beings, that the human being is always looking out to the world and watching the faces and the behaviors around it and always judging which appearances are loving, and friendly, and helpful, and which are fearful and dangerous. And so in order to undo this filter, we must train our mind to a new way of perceiving and that’s why the very first workbook lesson in A Course in Miracles is, “Nothing I see means anything.” And the second lesson is very important, “I have given everything I see, all the meaning it has for me,” and this is the thing they are discovering in Quantum Physics as well, that we perceive the world based on the meaning we give the world. And we are being shown that nothing happens to us, but everything happens for us because everything is happening in consciousness.

We have simply had a bad ego habit of judging that there are good things and bad things in the world. Love/hate are showing that the mind is split and it’s very unnatural to try to hold onto both of those emotions. And yet we have Jesus within us saying, “Bring them together and one will disappear, perfect Love casts out fear.” Hate must dissolve if you cease to protect it. So how do we protect hate? By seeing it in the world instead of our own mind, by seeing it acted out in externals instead of forgiving it inside where it’s at. And that is the purpose that has called all of us together.

We need only accept complete responsibility for our State of Mind always and without exception, and our happiness is guaranteed.